Shrinking Abby
by keyboardempress
Summary: Abby was once normal; she got good grades & drank her fair share of 6 dollar booze alongside her classmates. She was pretty standard, until she snapped. She saw Dr. after Dr., but none helped until she discovered Nathan Shaw, a recent graduate of an ivy league psychiatry program. He's unconventional & wacky & she might be falling for him. But he can't fall in love with a patient.
1. Chapter 1

I go through Shrinks faster than my sugar-deprived nephew goes through a bag of Skittles. It just is what it is.

We meet, we talk, we break up. It's usually a one-shot deal, like a blind date gone wrong. As soon as they begin diagnosing the cause of my 'illness' – I'm out. There is no cause. It just happened.

I was your average college student, attending the local four year option because it was cheaper, and besides, several of my high school friends had made the same choice. I was getting decent grades, drinking my share of six-dollar booze, and living quite contentedly in a tiny, off-campus apartment with Lynn, my best friend of almost nine years.

It was around the end of my freshman year, about the time of my eighteenth birthday that everything just snapped. Like a twig beneath a heavy boot. _Snap. _That's all, folks.

Suddenly I couldn't go to class. I would get nauseous just thinking of it, outright sick if I attempted it. I had to leave my internship with the local paper because I couldn't stomach the thought of working alongside of others. They still allowed me to contribute to their online content, but they refused to pay me if I wouldn't attend their quarterly meetings.

I stopped going on dates, I stopped weekend excursions with friends, I stopped everything, basically. I holed up in my tiny apartment, where the world wasn't quite so terrifying. I started freelancing to pay for rent, doing odd here-and-there sort of jobs, mostly blog content. I enrolled in online classes, and I frequented chat rooms for company.

My roommate had made the transition far simpler than it might have been. Lynn was the soft sort, a sympathetic personality, and an enabler. She took care of my external needs, like grocery shopping. Our other friends chastised her for this; they said she was only making the situation worse. I disagreed, naturally.

I had created a new world for myself, a world that I could handle. It was comfortable here and it worked for me.

"I found something," Jacey said, setting her purse onto the high-rise countertop. Jacey was a mutual friend of ours and the most dedicated to 'finding a cure.' _Was there a cure for lunacy? _

"Let me guess, a new pill? Hollywood's latest and greatest remedy? Does it come in liquid form?"

She scowled as she unzipped her bag, removing item after item until her fingers found the folded piece of paper. She strode across the room, handing it to me.

I had to chew on my lip as I accepted it; for some reason, the surety of her attempts was always funny to me. Each time she 'found something' she was so confident that it would be the final time. That it would finally work. _I'd be cured. _

"Oh, good. Nathan Shaw's phone number."

Jasey seemed overly disgruntled as she snapped the piece of paper from my fingers and stalked back into the kitchen, wedging it beneath an old, Spring-Break magnet.

"Nathan Shaw is a traveling psychiatrist. He makes himself available to come to patient's homes instead of forcing them to meet at an office. He's been a guest on several news shows, has appeared in most big magazines-"

"A celebrity shrink." I rolled my eyes, turning my attention back to the laptop resting on my knees.

Jasey was beside me in seconds, her hand closing the screen.

"Abby, I'm serious. He's supposedly really good. Maybe he can…"

"Fix me?" I laughed, finding it ever amusing, albeit somewhat endearing that none of my friends could bring themselves to use words like illness, or disorder, or issue. My quackiness was the persistent elephant in the room.

"Not fix, Abby. Help. Help you to cope."

"I'm coping. I have a job, I have a boyfriend-"

She snorted, surprising us both with her uncharacteristic lapse in control. She coughed into her closed fist, flicking her eyes from one corner of the room to the other, as if she'd find the words she needed suspended in the air around us.

"A boyfriend you have never met, Abby," she said slowly. "You have an online-only relationship with someone you met in a chatroom. You don't even know what he looks like-"

"We skype, now. He's tall, he has dark hair-"

"Abby."

"Ok! But really, what do we even know about this guy?" I asked, re-opening my laptop. My Google homepage greeted me as I typed in the name Jasey had written for me.

"He's probably just some over-hyped, media-enthusiastic phony," I said, clicking on the first available link. Jasey sighed.

"Nathan Shaw," I read, scanning over the Wikipedia entry. "Born in Caswell, Maine. Attended Brown University. M.D. in psychiatry, specializes in anxiety disorders and phobias."

I scrolled further, a recent picture of Nathan Shaw appearing on the screen. I gasped.

"Jasey, he's like, our age. He can't be more than a few months out of school."

"He's older. He's twenty-four," Jasey said, shrugging her shoulders as she sat beside me. The abused green couch sank awkwardly in the center under our combined weight.

I whistled, nodding my head dramatically.

"Oh good. Four years. He's practically my grandfather, in that case."

Jasey threw her hands in the air, groaning.

"Seriously, Abby, you have some excuse for all of them. Do you want to spend the rest of your life here? There's so much world out there, Abby. This needs to stop."

I was stunned silent by her sudden outburst, so accustomed to her usually calm, calculated demeanor. She had never reprimanded me for my disorder-illness-issue before.

I glanced at the piece of paper hanging on the fringe, and then back to the photo of the impossibly young, fair-haired doctor staring at me from the screen. He looked like a fraud- more Hollywood glamour than medical know-how. But if it meant that much to Jasey, I would at least humor her by confirming that myself.

"I'll call," I conceded, frowning as she leapt to her feet, convulsing into a bizarre interpretation of our happy dance.

"I have a feeling," she sang, tilting her head as she waved her arms wildly to the side. Now it was my turn to groan.

_She always had a feeling. _


	2. Chapter 2

2

I'd hung up twice already, which really wasn't all that bad considering my track record. Just because I flew through shrinks didn't mean it was an easy process; in fact, it was pretty difficult nowadays for me to use the phone in general, save for calls placed to the select few I spoke with every day.

"Dr. Shaw's office, Vanity speaking, how can I help you?"

_Was her name seriously Vanity? _

I coughed into the receiver and could almost feel the annoyance surging through the line from the other end. After a brief but awkward pause, I located my voice, albeit a somewhat froggy, raspy version of its typical self.

"Hi, um, my name is Abby, that's, um, Abigail Tremming. I, uh, I was hoping to book an appointment with Dr. Shaw?"

"Alright, Abby, can I get an address for you?"

_Another pause. You would think it was a difficult question._

She seemed to have regained her patience; her tone was sweet and light, like the sort of cakes that Lynn and Jasey liked to make. _All the flavor, half the calories. _

She read me back the address, before moving on to other details: phone number, age, and my personal favorite – what seems to be the problem? _The world, basically. _

"Ok, Abby. Any particular date or time of day work better for you?"

"Not really. I'm here all the time." _Like, ALL of the time. _

"Well, Dr. Shaw will be traveling to the New England region two weeks from tomorrow, so I can set you up with a date in that timeframe. I'll have someone call you back with two or three options for you to choose from and you'll be all set."

"Perfect, thank you."

I tapped the red button with my thumb, letting the phone fall onto the couch cushion beside me. My stomach growled as I was suddenly and painfully aware of my lack of breakfast. I had deliberately skipped my usual blueberry muffin and large, iced coffee as phone calls like the one I'd just made had a tendency to make me ill. Just another side effect of Abby's quacky world.

I nearly toppled from the couch as the phone rang out beside me, Lynn's frightening intuition dialing in on cue.

I lifted the phone, jabbing the receive button as I let myself fall back against the frayed pillows.

"You did it?" she asked, without preamble.

"You really did bug this place, huh. I thought you were joking when you said you were going to do that."

She sighed on the other end of the line and I could hear a crinkling noise in the background; if my intuition were anything like hers, it was a bag of Salt n Vinegar chips and she had caved on her diet on yet another stressful Monday morning.

"I didn't bug the place. I don't know where you think I'd get the money anyway," she said, now very clearly chewing between words. "So, I'm right? You called?"

"They are calling me back with an appointment."

"So, this is happening."

"Looks like."

I set the phone on speaker and slid my laptop from its resting place on the side table. I'd feel better once I had poured myself into one of my ongoing projects. This guy from Seattle wanted three articles a week for his guitar-themed blog, which was proving to be quite the task. It wouldn't have been, had I played the guitar or been musically inclined in any way.

"I'm proud of you, Abby," Lynn said, "and I'm glad that Jasey came across this. It looks really promising."

I didn't mention that I thought it looked like complete B.S. I wasn't about to go at it with two of them at once. Instead I just snorted my assent.

"I can hear your background starting up so I will let you work, I just wanted to call and check-in. I'm picking up pizza on the way home; it'll probably be a little early today, like around fivish."

"Sounds good."

"See you Abs."

"Bye."

Before her lunch break ended, Lynn would call Jasey, and one of them, in turn, would call Rene. That's how we worked, especially when it came to my 'progress'. We were an ongoing news bulletin, passed along from one eager reader to the next. And I was usually the front page news. I didn't mind; it was nice that they cared. It just might have been a little easier if they didn't care quite so much.


End file.
